A swimmer glides through clear water in Blue Hole in Ichetucknee Springs State Park. Some legislators think the state owns too much park land and should instead give millions of preservation dollars to farmers and ranchers, even though the public won’t get access. (Photo via Florida State Parks)
Officials in Florida — a state with a 500-year-old Spanish name — recently announced that they would require everyone taking a driving test to do so in English only. I wish the folks in charge would also require the Legislature to speak that language.
Right now, our fine lawmakers are doing something incredibly dopey. I know that’s not surprising, given that this is a legislative body that once accidentally outlawed sex. What they’re doing now isn’t quiiiiite that bad, but it’s in the same bumbling ballpark.
I am referring to a recent story from my Phoenix colleague Mitch Perry that was headlined, “Proposed budgets defund Florida Forever but do provide for conservation easements.”
Here’s what the story says is going on: “Although the Legislature allocated $18 million last year [for Florida Forever], the House’s proposed FY 2026/27 budget defunds the program outright, while the Senate allocates $35 million, with that money directed to easements on private agricultural lands only, eliminating traditional land acquisition.
“Instead, GOP lawmakers would direct hundreds of millions of dollars to the Rural and Family Lands Protection program, which allows agricultural landowners to permanently preserve their land from development.”
I had a hard time grasping how they could do something so stupid, so I called up a bunch of experts. They agreed with me.
“It’s definitely a baffling move,” said Sarah Gledhill, president of the Florida Wildlife Federation.
If you listened to the legislative “leaders” who’ve been gabbling about this, you might get the impression that these two land-preservation programs offer roughly the same benefits. You would be mistaken.
This is where a requirement for them to use plain English would come in handy. If I could get these tongue-tangling lawmakers enrolled in an English as a Second Language Class, here’s what I would tell them:
Florida Forever benefits THE PUBLIC.
Conservation easements on ranches and farms benefit PRIVATE LANDOWNERS.
Now repeat it with me, class: Florida Forever is for the PUBLIC. Conservation easements on ranches and farms are NOT.
Or, as St. Petersburg Rep. Lindsay Cross — an actual environmental scientist — explained during a House debate last week, “You can’t just park on the side of the road, sneak under a barbed wire fence, and take your family for a hike on a cattle ranch.”
Now there’s a woman who speaks plain English!
Florida Never
If you’re not familiar with Florida Forever — or as the Legislature prefers to call it, “Florida Never” — it’s a land-buying program that descended from another popular land-buying program.
There was a time when Florida had the best environmental land-buying program in the nation, one that preserved thousands of acres of forests, rivers, swamps, lakes, beaches, and other vital parts of our fast-disappearing natural landscape.
Florida Forever, begun in 2001, was financed in a fairly painless way, too. It uses taxes on real estate transactions, known as documentary stamps, to pay off bonds. The money is used to purchase land that’s gone through an elaborate selection process in which the candidate parcels are vetted and listed for purchase based on the priority of acquisition.
Audubon Florida calls it “Florida’s Best Idea.”
And it’s had a terrific payoff, said Clay Henderson, who wrote the definitive book on environmental land preservation programs in Florida, “Forces of Nature.”
“One of the great things that happened … is we established over 20 new state parks and the best state park system in the country,” Henderson told me.
People loooooooooooove the Florida State Parks. Tourists and residents flock to them by the millions. The parks are not just a natural respite from all the concrete that the developers keep slapping down all over. Every year, the parks generate $3.6 billion-with-a-B in direct economic impacts to communities around the state.
If you’re one of the people who likes visiting our award-winning Florida state park system, you should be grateful for the work of Florida Forever.
The program has continued to be extremely popular. Well, popular with the public, that is.
The Legislature? Eh, not so much.
Getting away with it
After getting off to a good start, Florida lawmakers then began siphoning off the Florida Forever money to general revenue, where they could use it to plug budget holes left by their other silly spending practices.
In his first year in office, then-Gov. Rick Scott cut it out completely. His administration then set to work dismantling the state agency in charge of assessing and acquiring environmental land, cutting its staff and funding.
Scott’s collection of geniuses even proposed, in 2013, selling off $50 million worth of the land that had already been bought. Fortunately, the list of lands proposed for sale stirred up so much opposition that they wound up selling not a single acre.
Florida’s voters took a dim view of such behavior. In 2014, they voted to pass Amendment One, which put into the state Constitution a requirement that Florida set aside $10 billion over the next 20 years to be used for purchasing environmentally sensitive land.
The measure passed by a wide margin — 75%, more than any of the candidates on the same ballot. The vote created the largest state-based conservation initiative in U.S. history.
Yet Florida’s legislators ignored it, just as they ignored such earlier voter-driven referendums on limiting class sizes and allowing ex-felons to vote. They have continued shortchanging Florida Forever. If I were the official DJ for the Florida Legislature, I’d play “Been Caught Stealing” by Jane’s Addiction at every session.
For instance, during the first legislative session after the amendment passed, they set aside just $17.4 million for the program, not the $300 million called for by the amendment. Their explanation for swiping the money was a doozy, too.
“Some legislators contended the public didn’t know what they were voting for and they were very nasty about it,” one legislator told me.
If this were a Hollywood movie, the Capitol would have been swarmed by an army of cops led by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, quickly slapping handcuffs on these scofflaws. Alas, this is not Hollywood. The lawbreaking lawmakers got away with it.
And this year is even worse.
The backlog blame
Two years ago, our governor tried putting golf courses, hotels, and pickleball courts in state parks. People from all sides of the political spectrum came out screaming, protesting this idiotic idea in every corner of the state.
The Legislature wound up passing a law last year forbidding any governor from ever again attempting anything so stupid. Yet at the same time, they limited the amount of money that could be spent on buying new parks, preserves, and forests.
“We’re drifting away from putting money into parks where people can go to enjoy what the Legislature provides,” said Eric Draper, a Florida native who served as Florida state parks director from 2017 until 2021. “We need these places to go, where people can enjoy the water, swim in the springs, and take their families boating and fishing.”
The problem, Gledhill told me, is that some of our more influential legislators “have started to believe the state owns too much land and it costs too much to maintain it.”
“The dadgum gubmint owns too much land” used to be a common talking point for the strident anti-government Tea Party candidates in Florida.
You remember the Tea Party, don’t you? They’re the folks who claimed protecting manatees was against the Bible. Apparently, this talking point of theirs has resurfaced, a form of intellectual recycling.
These folks are correct that there’s a massive maintenance backlog in our parks. But that happens to be the fault of the Legislature, which controls the purse strings.
A recent report found a $759 million backlog of needed repairs. About two-thirds of that amount would repair visitor centers, cabins, pavilions, restrooms, boardwalks, and fences as well as improving plumbing, electric, and heating and air conditioning systems.
Has the Legislature leaped to fix those things? It has not. But the Legislature is OK with squandering gobs of cash on other things.
For instance, they gave their blessing to buying 4 acres of land in Destin owned by one of the governor’s campaign contributors ($83 million). And they seem strangely uninterested in that concentration camp in the Big Cypress National Preserve that he built without any environmental studies whatsoever and is burning through more than $1 million a day.
But fixing the parks that millions of people actually use? And buying more land to make more parks? No way, dude, that’s flat-out wasting money.
Instead, they say, let’s hand millions over to farmers and ranchers who don’t let visitors on their property.
Wild vs. working
I want to be clear about this. My grandmother worked as a sharecropper in Jackson County. My parents both grew up on family farms in the Florida Panhandle. I have nothing but respect for Florida’s farmers and ranchers.
I don’t want you to think I am slighting these folks when I slam the Legislature for handing a few of them the millions that we should be spending on Florida Forever.
GOP Rep. John Snyder from Stuart, chair of the Agriculture and Natural Resources Budget Subcommittee, said this during the recent House debate on defunding Florida Forever:
“At the end of the day, Floridians expect this Legislature to use the money that we are stewards over to dedicate a portion of that to preserving beautiful real Florida forever,” he said. “To make sure that the lands that make this state what it is can be put into a place of trust, where for generations to come Floridians have the ability to look and reap the benefits of that.”
Gee, that sounds like an argument for spending MORE money on Florida Forever, not less. He even mentioned the program by name. But that wasn’t his intent at all.
Instead, he and House Budget Appropriations Chair Lawrence McClure said they prefer steering as much money as possible to the Rural and Family Lands Protection Program.
“The role of ‘Family Lands’ has a tremendous track record of conserving lands while keeping it in production, right?” McClure said. “So, government can specifically say, ‘This is how we want to conserve it.’ But the taxpayer’s not going to own the burden of maintaining it.”
The taxpayers also are not going to be able to access that land. No swimming in any spring, stream, creek, or river on that property. No fishing and no boating. No biking or hiking through the forests or spotting birds flitting amid the branches.
If we required legislators to speak plain English, they’d acknowledge that this is a big problem. There’s another one that was pointed out to me by Eugene Kelly of the Florida Native Plant Society.
Those Family Lands purchases let the state acquire the development rights on the property while they continue being farmed. The state takes ownership of what’s called a “conservation easement” on the property. Kelly told me he refuses to use the term “because they do not conserve nature.”
In fact, he said, “natural areas can be converted to agricultural uses at the discretion of the landowner. … If the current landowner, or any future landowner, wants to convert the entire property to row crops, it would generally be totally acceptable under the easement terms.”
Gledhill put it perfectly, I think, when she told me the difference between the two programs is this: Florida Forever preserves “wild Florida,” while the Rural and Family Lands Program preserves “working Florida.”
Who’s behind this?
The most influential politician who’s been raising a ruckus about Florida owning too much land for parks and preserves is Agriculture Commissioner Wilton Simpson, a former state Senate president.
“I don’t think it’s appropriate for the state to own all these lands,” he told the Senate Agriculture Committee in 2023. He’s even been advocating the state sell off some of its preserved property.
Now take a wild guess who controls the money being doled out by the Rural and Family Lands program. If you picked “the Simpson who’s not named Homer,” you’d be right.
You can see why he’s in favor of steering the taxpayers’ money away from Florida Forever and into this save-the-farmers program he controls. Not only does it fit with his ideological distaste for the state preserving land, it also lets him play savior to farmers and ranchers struggling to get by.
Simpson made a fortune in a farming-adjacent business, running a Pasco County industrial egg operation with a million chickens. He’s worth a clucking $20 million, and that’s no yolk.
If Simpson wants to play Mr. Moneybags for our hard-pressed Florida farmers and ranchers, he should give them some of HIS money. Leave us taxpayers out of it.
Then the Legislature would be free to direct our millions to Florida Forever the way we voters told them to. We said it pretty clearly too, and in plain English.